I've never been very good at this whole "everything2 is a community" thing, mostly because I hate people and I hate the Internet. However, this past weekend it turned out that dem bones and CletusTheFoetus were going to be in the same city that I happened to be visiting. Coincidence of coincidences, all three of us were descending on Tokyo for the same reason: we were planning to burn an orphanage.

bewilderbeast has a terrible deformity that prevents her from speaking English, and creases has no hands, so we could not communicate by telephone and we could not exchange e-mail. This made planning our meeting rather difficult, and precluded the creation of a preparatory nodeshell. Eventually we required the aid of highly-trained radioactive vervet monkeys and phenomenologists in order to find one another in the humming crowds of the metropolis.

Luckily, immediately before we met, creases was possessed by the spirit of John Milton, which made him a very fine poet but unfortunately added his left foot to the list of his unusable extremities.

Tokyo is nothing if not a site for interreligious dialogue, liberalism, and spirituality. It is also known as The Forbidden Zone, partially because its entire population is made up of racists (ask them about what their hats are made of) and peewoks.

The superego eventually caught up with us in the form of a) bewilderbeast's parents and b) an inordinately nice cop who drove us to our homes in Prague. The orphanage took nearly a week to burn to cinders, which week the three of us spent toasting Slavoj Zizek and weeping bitter tears of grief.

Hereafter I mean to address some details that have been omitted from the above account of the nodermeet. Any discrepancies between the narratives are the fault of the monkeys.

Hapax is a widely-known and -beloved photojournalist who specialises in depictions of demolition and decay. Her most recent exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art, featured the machinery used in the oilfields of northern Alberta. The images are haunting and strangely provocative: demi-nude roughnecks slathered in black tar silhouetted against smog-yellow sunsets, twenty-foot drills penetrating the ruined landscape, spiralling downward in search of black gold a hundred feet below ground; steampunk meets Georgia O'Keeffe, but with phalluses. The photograph from the cover of the exhibit catalogue, entitled "Rock Out with Your Cock Out", hangs on the wall at the foot of my bed.

This past weekend in Tokyo she intended to photograph a dilapidated orphanage that pingouin and I, her shiftless assistants, had researched earlier in the year. Unfortunately by the time we arrived the building had been demolished and a new apartment block was already being erected on the lot where it once stood. We were left with no recourse but to find another orphanage to destroy.

The questionable legality of our mission meant that we needed to travel to Tokyo separately, and under assumed names. Once we arrived and found ourselves, we set off for our emergency backup orphanage by subway, via an elaborate circuitous route of backtracking and leaving false leads that pingouin devised to shake off any would-be pursuers.

The subway system is itself made up of elaborate circuitous routes. It was built as a make-work exercise during an economic recession and features spectacular marble floors and intricate stonework pillars and silver-plated chandeliers, all mediated by interpretive plaques that offer a fanciful account of their origin:

This subway's forebear was destroyed in an earthquake, and it was rebuilt by a thousand manual labourers who cut the stones with their teeth. Their bellies grew heavy with rock and they sank into the earth beneath the tunnels, into a cavern so deep that unable to escape they built their own city there; and the foundation they made is strong enough to withstand any natural disaster.

We were not followed.

I wasn't really into the idea of having any kind of "meet". I had more important things to do.

Anyway I'd met "bewilderbeast" before and wasn't really impressed with her. She is kind of a dolt, and also has this naïve perky sunshine demeanor that I think is probably a put-on, because come on, nobody could really be that stupid. I wasn't too eager to meet her again.

We met at some kind of greasy burger place that bewilderbeast had chosen. She brought her parents. They were alright, had this sort of conventional uptight conservative thing going on. I could see why their daughter could turn out as dumb as she did.

The place smelled like piss and ammonia. I didn't want to risk e. coli, so I just got a milkshake. Somehow even that made me sick. I would later get the shits something terrible. The company surely didn't help.

"hapax" came in later. She virtually burst into the place. She had a briefcase that was spilling papers, and she was humming Cure songs loudly to herself. She had a big silver ankh of the sort as might be worn by a teenager, although she was clearly a grown woman who was supposed to be at a professional conference.

Their company was inane. Bewilderbeast has this ditzy laugh that really got on my nerves, and couldn't stop talking about fashion and cute boys. Hapax kept staring at me and asking me about my dreams. I told her about one where I was just eating an orange, and she gave me some kind of absurd explanation about "what it really means" about my fear of sexual inadequacy. I think this was her way of hitting on me, because she kept touching my knee in this really awkward, overly-obvious way, while staring bug-eyed at me and sometimes licking her lips grotesquely.

The whole thing was so ridiculous, I excused myself early and went home.